8 ms·

I was reading something the other day about how reddit has killed the community feel of forums. And thinking about it I agree, I can remember pre reddit I used

I was reading something the other day about how reddit has killed the community feel of forums. And thinking about it I agree, I can remember pre reddit I used to be reasonably active on a few forums, made friends etc. Reddit interactions feel a lot more ephemeral if that’s the right word.

klokoman 9y ago
Because there aren't avatars and signatures. Those are essential to recognize users and also find out what they're about (signatures with links to other sites helped everyone). Also even a little personalization will be an incentive to invest a little more time in the community.
- mynewtb 9y ago
  Also the concept of voting and strictly time-based decaying.
  - always_good 9y ago
    Yeah, without bumping threads on new posts, there's almost no reason to even comment on older topics on HN/Reddit. If it's not on the first two pages, nobody is going to see it. Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting. This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online. The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      Yeah for sure, and even here on HN. I don't reply to comments older than a few days because the only one who will see them is the person I'm replying to. And if my comment is a correction or a clarification, the person I'm responding to may not take it well, so my comment hits 0 or even negative numbers, without the possibility of the general population correcting that (then again, without the risk of them further correcting me if I'm wrong). It's just not worth it.
      - KajMagnus 9y ago
        Here's a Reddit & HN like discussion system (I'm developing it) that mitigates? (solves?) the problem with Reddit & HN that [only the one you reply to see your comment]: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... Because: 1) when you post a comment, the topic bumps to the top of the topic list. Like a normal forum. 2) inside the topic, people quickly find the recent comments, via the sidebar (as shown in the video "Finding new comments"). (B.t.w. agree that Reddit & HN feel ephemeral. I remember maybe 2 usernames here at HN, and 2 at Reddit, although having spent a lot more time here, than what I've done at Discoure's forum — nevertheless I remember many more people over at Discourse.)
    - icc97 9y ago
      Stack Overflow has the 'active' sorting. This is similar to bumping a topic with any activity to the top. This is the default as opposed to new. The mentions there work nicely too, I never get swamped with inbox messages, you can only mention one person in a comment, so there's no @channel nonsense as with Slack.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  There is 'flair' which is essentially a signature. And people get creative with usernames to replicate avatars.
  - magduf 9y ago
    Not so much. The "flair" I've seen is very, very limited (so a bunch of people will end up with the exact same ones; there might only be a handful of choices). And part of the usefulness of Reddit is having the same user account across the entire site, so you don't have to separately log into a dozen different forums about different topics. A creative username for a car-related subreddit is going to be pretty useless when you browse over to some subreddit about programming, where no one cares about your obsession with Skylines or whatever. Finally, that stuff isn't really visual the way iconic avatars are, where someone has some small picture for their user account.
    - oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
      Most of the subreddits I frequent allow you to choose freeform flair, and it's specific to each subreddit. Sure, though, it's limited in length and it's more closely analogous to a signature than an avatar.
      - magduf 9y ago
        Yeah, that was part of my point. That's not an avatar, it's just like a signature like you said.
    - petepete 9y ago
      There are custom text flairs available on some subreddits (for, say, camera models in r/photography) as well as icons (the club badges in r/soccer). It's quite flexible. Reddit now has profile images too but they are only displayed there.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I think you're right on avatars. Goofy as they are, they seem to matter. It somewhat hurts HN as well, IMO.
  - icc97 9y ago
    Even Facebook allows avatars. The ability to express yourself in all it's unprofessional ways is important. It's a way to show you're not Facebook. Each topic is built up from the colours of the people that participate there. Individual expression is allowed. Then it's just up to the forum owners to decide what crosses the line.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Yes, there's that. But I'm referring to the visual connection and neurological wiring. There's something about label + picture that transcends just one or the other. I've developed my own set of, ugh, "collateral" -- avatar, icon, hero -- which seem to work well across several sites. I find the anchoring works pretty well. And see the same for others I follow, again, both over time and sites. Mostly: G+, Ello, Twitter, Mastodon. Reddit, HN, and Metafilter would be exceptions.
john_minsk 9y ago
I feel you. But my 2 cents on this:we just got old, lazy and wise...
JackFr 9y ago
sigh ...newsgroups... I remember when I knew everyone on rec.sports.basketball.college and then the damn web came along, and everyone was on the internet.
- hollerith 9y ago
  I read newsgroups a lot (and posted some) not before the web was born, but certainly back when the web had only hundreds or thousands of users whereas newgroups had millions. I used to miss some things about newsgroups. For years, I missed the simplicity with which I could make a local copy of a news article for offline use -- something the web was always pretty bad at doing in such a way that I could count on being able to read the article while offline. But eventually I noticed that I almost never read those local copies (even though 25 years later they still exist on my current local machine and being plain text are still easy to read in isolation). If something on a web page does not register as interesting right away, but only after I've gone on to the next web page, the page after that, then the page after that, I can with .999 reliability go back to the web page that I've slowly come to consider interesting. (In other words, I can use the browser's history menu or history page to return to the page that was current 3 pages ago -- or 5 pages ago or whatever.) Going back to the news article I was reading 3 articles ago on the other hand was much less reliable. I learned how to use the arrow keys combined with the "tree view" in trn to get the reliability of the operation "go back 3 articles" up to something like .6, and going back one article could be done (with the = key in trn IIRC) with a single keystroke with a reliability of about .85, but if the article I wanted to go back to had fallen off an edge of the "tree view" (which consisted of no more than about 35 columns and 16 lines) then I would just give up on ever getting another look at the article. Of course this deficiency of newsgroups could've been fixed simply by someone's writing another newsreader, followed by my switching to it, but there were other things about newsgroups not so easily fixed that discouraged reflection and contemplation: for example, chances were about .07 that that the parent or any particular child (i.e., reply to) the article one was looking at was missing from one's news server. Often this had a predictable reason (i.e., many news servers culled articles over 30 days old, and the parent is probably older than that) but it was not rare for it to happen for no discernible reason. In other words, for me, a reflective reader, i.e., a reader who often wants to revisits things he read 10 minutes ago or a few hours ago that at the time of the initial reading I did not consider interesting and consequently did not bother to bookmark or make a local copy of (the rough newsgroup analog to the making a bookmark to a web page), the web or at least the web of the 1990s was a significant improvement over newsgroups.
Mononokay 9y ago
Just pick smaller subreddits. Of course if you stick to one with half a million users, you're not going to have a good time - the Facebookization of the site has been extremely evident in recent years, but smaller subs are still more or less independent forums. Pick a few niches and make a new account that only subscribes to small subreddits about them; it really does put a community feel to it all.
NeoBasilisk 9y ago
Subreddits also have a strong tendency to become echo chambers due to how Reddit works. Controversial opinions are downvoted into oblivion and fewer people see them. Traditional message boards have none of that.

klokoman 9y ago

Because there aren't avatars and signatures. Those are essential to recognize users and also find out what they're about (signatures with links to other sites helped everyone). Also even a little personalization will be an incentive to invest a little more time in the community.

mynewtb 9y ago
Also the concept of voting and strictly time-based decaying.
- always_good 9y ago
  Yeah, without bumping threads on new posts, there's almost no reason to even comment on older topics on HN/Reddit. If it's not on the first two pages, nobody is going to see it. Even worse, the only person who might see it is the one person you responded to since it's in the profile comment feed, and a back-and-forth isn't very interesting. This makes forums much different where each new reply bumps the topic into the eyes of any number of people who are online. The upstream is wrong. Avatars and (ugh) signatures don't make a forum. Being able to converse over time is what does it. That's how you get to know regulars beyond spotting their one-off posts per submission.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    Yeah for sure, and even here on HN. I don't reply to comments older than a few days because the only one who will see them is the person I'm replying to. And if my comment is a correction or a clarification, the person I'm responding to may not take it well, so my comment hits 0 or even negative numbers, without the possibility of the general population correcting that (then again, without the risk of them further correcting me if I'm wrong). It's just not worth it.
    - KajMagnus 9y ago
      Here's a Reddit & HN like discussion system (I'm developing it) that mitigates? (solves?) the problem with Reddit & HN that [only the one you reply to see your comment]: https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-3-things https://www.talkyard.io/-32/how-hacker-news-can-be-improved-... Because: 1) when you post a comment, the topic bumps to the top of the topic list. Like a normal forum. 2) inside the topic, people quickly find the recent comments, via the sidebar (as shown in the video "Finding new comments"). (B.t.w. agree that Reddit & HN feel ephemeral. I remember maybe 2 usernames here at HN, and 2 at Reddit, although having spent a lot more time here, than what I've done at Discoure's forum — nevertheless I remember many more people over at Discourse.)
  - icc97 9y ago
    Stack Overflow has the 'active' sorting. This is similar to bumping a topic with any activity to the top. This is the default as opposed to new. The mentions there work nicely too, I never get swamped with inbox messages, you can only mention one person in a comment, so there's no @channel nonsense as with Slack.
oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
There is 'flair' which is essentially a signature. And people get creative with usernames to replicate avatars.
- magduf 9y ago
  Not so much. The "flair" I've seen is very, very limited (so a bunch of people will end up with the exact same ones; there might only be a handful of choices). And part of the usefulness of Reddit is having the same user account across the entire site, so you don't have to separately log into a dozen different forums about different topics. A creative username for a car-related subreddit is going to be pretty useless when you browse over to some subreddit about programming, where no one cares about your obsession with Skylines or whatever. Finally, that stuff isn't really visual the way iconic avatars are, where someone has some small picture for their user account.
  - oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
    Most of the subreddits I frequent allow you to choose freeform flair, and it's specific to each subreddit. Sure, though, it's limited in length and it's more closely analogous to a signature than an avatar.
    - magduf 9y ago
      Yeah, that was part of my point. That's not an avatar, it's just like a signature like you said.
  - petepete 9y ago
    There are custom text flairs available on some subreddits (for, say, camera models in r/photography) as well as icons (the club badges in r/soccer). It's quite flexible. Reddit now has profile images too but they are only displayed there.
dredmorbius 9y ago
I think you're right on avatars. Goofy as they are, they seem to matter. It somewhat hurts HN as well, IMO.
- icc97 9y ago
  Even Facebook allows avatars. The ability to express yourself in all it's unprofessional ways is important. It's a way to show you're not Facebook. Each topic is built up from the colours of the people that participate there. Individual expression is allowed. Then it's just up to the forum owners to decide what crosses the line.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Yes, there's that. But I'm referring to the visual connection and neurological wiring. There's something about label + picture that transcends just one or the other. I've developed my own set of, ugh, "collateral" -- avatar, icon, hero -- which seem to work well across several sites. I find the anchoring works pretty well. And see the same for others I follow, again, both over time and sites. Mostly: G+, Ello, Twitter, Mastodon. Reddit, HN, and Metafilter would be exceptions.

john_minsk 9y ago

I feel you. But my 2 cents on this:we just got old, lazy and wise...

JackFr 9y ago

sigh ...newsgroups... I remember when I knew everyone on rec.sports.basketball.college and then the damn web came along, and everyone was on the internet.

hollerith 9y ago
I read newsgroups a lot (and posted some) not before the web was born, but certainly back when the web had only hundreds or thousands of users whereas newgroups had millions. I used to miss some things about newsgroups. For years, I missed the simplicity with which I could make a local copy of a news article for offline use -- something the web was always pretty bad at doing in such a way that I could count on being able to read the article while offline. But eventually I noticed that I almost never read those local copies (even though 25 years later they still exist on my current local machine and being plain text are still easy to read in isolation). If something on a web page does not register as interesting right away, but only after I've gone on to the next web page, the page after that, then the page after that, I can with .999 reliability go back to the web page that I've slowly come to consider interesting. (In other words, I can use the browser's history menu or history page to return to the page that was current 3 pages ago -- or 5 pages ago or whatever.) Going back to the news article I was reading 3 articles ago on the other hand was much less reliable. I learned how to use the arrow keys combined with the "tree view" in trn to get the reliability of the operation "go back 3 articles" up to something like .6, and going back one article could be done (with the = key in trn IIRC) with a single keystroke with a reliability of about .85, but if the article I wanted to go back to had fallen off an edge of the "tree view" (which consisted of no more than about 35 columns and 16 lines) then I would just give up on ever getting another look at the article. Of course this deficiency of newsgroups could've been fixed simply by someone's writing another newsreader, followed by my switching to it, but there were other things about newsgroups not so easily fixed that discouraged reflection and contemplation: for example, chances were about .07 that that the parent or any particular child (i.e., reply to) the article one was looking at was missing from one's news server. Often this had a predictable reason (i.e., many news servers culled articles over 30 days old, and the parent is probably older than that) but it was not rare for it to happen for no discernible reason. In other words, for me, a reflective reader, i.e., a reader who often wants to revisits things he read 10 minutes ago or a few hours ago that at the time of the initial reading I did not consider interesting and consequently did not bother to bookmark or make a local copy of (the rough newsgroup analog to the making a bookmark to a web page), the web or at least the web of the 1990s was a significant improvement over newsgroups.

Mononokay 9y ago

Just pick smaller subreddits. Of course if you stick to one with half a million users, you're not going to have a good time - the Facebookization of the site has been extremely evident in recent years, but smaller subs are still more or less independent forums. Pick a few niches and make a new account that only subscribes to small subreddits about them; it really does put a community feel to it all.

NeoBasilisk 9y ago

Subreddits also have a strong tendency to become echo chambers due to how Reddit works. Controversial opinions are downvoted into oblivion and fewer people see them. Traditional message boards have none of that.